In this article, we will talk about how the rapidly changing digital landscape and customer behavior redefine requirements for marketing automation as we know it.
Newage.io, is a product-led company connecting people and technology to make our teams and clients succeed, headquartered in Ukraine.
Before the war, the team was tasked to choose and integrate a marketing automation platform focusing on customer retention on one of the projects for an existing client. As most existing solutions were not suitable, despite the variety of outstanding features, developers decided to create their own tool.
Newage’s product team executed market research and found that not all SMB companies in Ukraine know about marketing automation or engagement platforms; hence their goal was to help medium and small businesses to use these solutions.
This case made the team think about the more significant problem businesses face today – the complexity of tools to be used daily and the lack of time to adopt new technologies, given the number of urgent tasks.
Retainly is an automated engagement platform that helps businesses maximize customer retention and loyalty.
The new platform allows clients to gain insight into customers’ habits, needs, and trends and form customer loyalty.
According to Sanjulian Nis, Retainly’s Product Owner, the main goal and idea of Retainly are to help business, marketing, and product teams manage interaction with users efficiently, optimize routine processes and increase customer lifetime value.
Retainly’s marketing team conducted a series of interviews with marketers in Ukraine before the war as we planned to initially launch our platform in April. They were coming from IT-sector, FinTech, and Retail.
9 out of 10 shared that they experienced the following challenges:
– Heavy manual effort to run marketing campaigns
- Need to have training before using complex marketing tools
- Using different marketing tools that aren’t integrated
- It takes too long to put together marketing reports
- Need IT to help access & segment customer data
- Low budget for well-known tools – meaning they could hardly afford Hubspot or were not trained enough to deal with Synerise or Customer.io.
- Some of them were using just email automation (Mailchimp, SendPulse, or eSputnik)
What is engagement automation, and how is it different from marketing automation?
Olha Olifirenko, Retainly’s Product Marketing Lead, says that marketing and engagement automation are two sides of a coin. Many marketers think that sending automated emails can be called automation, but this is not what real automation is.
One of the most powerful marketing automation capabilities is its ability to help marketers nurture prospects by delivering the right content to prospects at the proper stage of their journeys to ultimately nudge them toward the subsequent conversion — whether that’s a download or a subscription.
“Engagement, in its turn, Olifirenko continues, changes the whole funnel into a flying wheel. Once the lead became a paying customer, businesses considered them obsolete — until it was time to re-sign that contract. We wanted to change that and concentrate our efforts on retaining existing customers”.
What main capabilities should engagement automation include?
Supporting users only when they have a problem with your product is not enough. You have to collaborate with them at different stages of their journey to achieve a great customer experience. An engagement automation tool can help you:
- Send automated messaging across multiple channels or provide omnichannel communication (Emails, SMS, notifications, web pushes, web hooks).
- Segment data for targeted marketing (here starts an engagement!)
- Build a solid Data Storage that can be used by marketing/sales
Collect and enrich data about your customers for generating insights and then create tailored communication based on this data) - Evaluate the effectiveness of tactics and channels
Real-time analytics allows you to make some adjustments to campaigns to ensure the customer gets a personalized message (it’s more than just a Dear “name” in an email).
What industries or scenarios engagement automation is most suitable for?
Businesses in eCommerce, retail, FinTech, iGaming, HoReCa (hotels, restaurants, and catering) and more are already taking advantage of automation: low-code functionality, user-friendliness, intuitive automation, and pre-built integrations with a range of other marketing tools.
For example, a seamless eCommerce operation needs many different factors to be successful: packing, shipping, supply chains, human resources, business planning and much more.
Retainly can help them free up vital admin time by automating key parts of the eCommerce marketing:
- Transactional flows (item was added to a cart but not paid, price became lower on viewed item, let customer know when item became available, send shipping details etc.)
- Reactivation flows (users didn’t visit websites for some time, are not reading emails /sms/viber, didn’t make a purchase for some time, etc.)
- Service flows (Welcome flow, information related to orders and statuses: accepted/canceled/in progress/delivered etc.)
- Promo flows (New items/products, recommendations)
The platform has an incredibly ambitious roadmap, so the team focuses all of its efforts on releasing new functionality with a regular cadence of at least once per month. Retainly’s developers were not trying to repeat other tools, and the functionality is concentrated more on customer retention and engagement: proper segmentation, advanced flows, behavioral analysis, and loyalty programs (in the future). The tool combines the needed function of marketing automation, removing the odd features and engagement automation with in-depth customer behavior analytics.
If you are a Ukraine-based company, you can apply for a free account at https://retainly.app or contact the support team